Page 186 - WhyAsInY
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Why (as in yaverbaum)
weirdest things that I did was to umpire a game and intentionally make wrong calls on relatively close plays, so that I might convey ideas con- cerning how best to react when a dispute might be warranted; he did not recall that to me.)
I must admit, however, that the best thing about being a counselor was the rather unfettered social life that I enjoyed, really enjoyed, at what was a good time and a good place to be unfettered. It was, more- over, a social life that only got better when, in my last summer at Kee-Wah, thanks to my parents’ having acquired their 1961 Cadillac, I became the proud owner of my first car, a 1955 black and white Oldsmo- bile Rocket 88 coupe.
(As a New York City resident, I was not eligible for a driver’s license until I was eighteen, which I turned in November 1962. It took me two tries to get that precious document. That was because when I took my first test, thinking that I was doing precisely what the examiner had asked for, I commenced to make a left-hand turn into what turned out to be an off-ramp of the Belt Parkway. The car, which was the one in which I was professionally taught [my father and I having had somewhat of a “lack of chemistry” when he tried to teach me to drive], was equipped with a second set of brakes the forcefulness of which was amply demon- strated to me by the examiner.)
Because of my more mobile social life, I acquired two girlfriends, whom I “imported” to Amherst to fill the void in my social calendar, which was, I thought, empty as the result of the decision to take S.P. when I entered Andries Hudde.
And it is with that poignant observation and foreshadowing (or, more properly, aft-shadowing, as the Olds was acquired after my sopho- more year in college) that I finally complete the saga of my adventures in camp (in the next chapter), and then turn back the clock (in Chapter Fifteen) to the adventure that was my freshman year at Amherst.
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